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[lojban] Re: A Discussion of the Lojban System of Place Structure



On Wednesday, March 27, 2013 7:08:36 AM UTC+4, Daniel Evans wrote:
I just wanted to get my thoughts down and organize them for myself. Doing so was best achieved by writing a paper about it, and that ended up being too much work to keep it to myself. I'm interested by what others think. It would be unbelievably cool if my ideas could be implemented, but I don't necessarily expect it.

It is attached to this post. Enjoy!

Several notes not necessarily on Lojban but on the understanding of other languages.
The phrase "“Is it possible to assign this system to any current or future lojban word without 
making exceptions? That is, is this system complete enough to handle the full range of human thought
and communication?” My answer is that I do not know. However, it works for Russian and many, many
other languages – why would it fail here?"

The answer is that there is no such system in Russian. You patched Russian case system, namely dropped Prepositional Case.
Secondly, Russian can't express all sumti places using only declension. The full system is the following

"verb + [preposition + ] noun/pronoun +case "

This system both works for English and Russian.
Namely, in English

"go, with , they  => to go with them"

Here we attach the preposition to the verb, then add a pronoun "they" that is declined into "them". There are two cases in English, "nominative" and "oblique" (terms may vary).

As in Russian there are 6 cases some prepositions may work with more than one case. So e.g.

с ними [s nimi] = with them (the glossing is "with they-INSTRUMENTAL")
с них [s nikh] = from them (the glossing is "with they-GENITIVE").


As for the rest of the paper ambiguities raised by practice of speaking such language will be obvious. e.g.
"tavla: NOM talks/speaks to DAT  about subject LOC in language INS"

Locative here would rather mean the place where you are talking rather than the subject of what you talking about. Notice that both Russian and English use the same preposition "about" ("о" in Russian) to describe the subject of the talk. However (ke'u), prepositions were ignored in this system.

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